Past-life fragments and unresolved issues
In modern developmental psychology the ego and the character-structure of the personality is the result of going through the developmental tasks from our birth and through early childhood – some say that this starts even before birth.
When we re-incarnate we bring with us a history of evolutionary events or tasks to solve in the present incarnation
The function of ego and personality is to become a self-conscious individual – the process of individuation.
If we look at the evolution of human beings on a collective level – it has taken many thousands years to develop the capacity of self-consciousness and individuality. In many parts of the world today, this is not fully developed yet.
So what we, as a species developed over thousands of years is in a way repeated in our upbringing.
When we re-incarnate we bring with us a history of evolutionary events or tasks to solve in the present incarnation. These evolutionary tasks or unresolved past-life fragments begins to resonate and activate as we go through the different phases in the building of the ego and personality, and thereby the past-life fragments are brought into our life as dynamic elements of our ego, personality and self-consciousness, even though we are unconscious of the activated fragments.
The themes of past-life fragments may have been very dramatic, such as executions, war, love/hate relations, poisoning, imprisoning, solitude, positions of power, greed, lust, virtue, religion, witchcraft, slavery etc.
When these fragments are activated we need not to look at them as so dramatic in the outer, but to see after the essence of the emotional content and following patterns.
In this lifetime, you might experience different problems with these conditions and with communication and self-expression.
Many people have had a lot of incarnations. In order to evolve we have to experience through the polarity qualities of evolutionary themes for balance and expansion of consciousness – some examples are:
Power – helplessness
Arrogance – humility
Separativeness – cooperation
Hate – love
Greed – sharing
Criticism – evaluation
Procrastination – action
Selfishness – service
Our life is what our Soul planned. We must accept responsibility for our own life and choices.
Many reactions and emotional contents can be re-awakened. The unconscious content stirs up by attracting situations that are close to or similar to the original situation/theme. This goes for both present and past life issues.
An important aspect is that the themes of past-life fragments are mostly activated in our present life during a confrontation in a developmental task or critical situation. Now developmental tasks emerge during our whole lifespan, and do not exclusively belong to our childhood. They seem to merge together – when the issue of a particular past-life fragment and the issue of the developmental task are similar. They also merge with our self-consciousness and are reflected in our self-esteem etc. They become part of how we see ourselves and others; we can even believe that they really are who we are (identifying). So a fragment can “take us over” just like a possession or an obsession.
Our life is what our Soul planned. We must accept responsibility for our own life and choices
Now, we are not our past-life fragments, they are not part of our deeper identity – this is an important distinction to realize. Their job is only to serve as a task to develop and expand our consciousness.
However when the past-life fragment is activated, the content (mostly the emotional content) often feels to painful to confront, so it will be repressed into the un-conscious, which also means that the memory will be stored alternatively in the physical body, our fantasies or our dream life. The point is that anything that is repressed is not directly available to our consciousness and is not a part of our conscious memory banks. But the energy is still there and it is active.
The dynamics of this energy is what Gestaltpsychology and Gestalttherapy has described as homeostasis. It means the unfulfilled gestalt of the situation will seek union with the consciousness to become whole again (to fulfil the gestalt). The repressed and unconscious part of the situation will find a way to our consciousness to be in balance again.
This is done by talking to us in other “languages” than the logical mind use. It might be in dreams or nightmares – talking the language of dreams, which is part of a greater and more collective language – the language of symbols. Then you might be attracted to mysterious and strange symbols etc. Or the repressed energy might “re-arrange” or attract situations that have the capacity to open you to the repressed content.
In psychology it is talked about as the original situation that created your trauma (pain) is re-played again and again until you discover the lost content and start working with it.
These situations, that the unconscious re-create, might be frightening to us and we don’t understand why we always find ourselves in those particular situations.
This dynamic energy, from our present life traumas and past-life fragments, is very active in attracting other people and in our relationships. This is the mayor field for activating repressed material – we experience ourselves, and re-live our traumatic and unresolved issues, in the process of relating with our family, spouses, children, friends, colloquies, clients, authorities etc.
The Ego-personality’s complex
A part of the process of expansion goes through agony, pain and suffering. When the ego-personality feels that, its defence-system automatically activates. It is a basic instinct that is a conditioned reflex. It protects us from “real danger”, but it also blocks the process of expansion. That is one of the reasons that the evolution of consciousness is so “slow”.
We have to come to term with the fact that we do not have a choice whether to stop evolution or not, our choice is only how to cope with the process of expansion
The expansion process is really the expansion of our consciousness.
This frightens us in the same degree we are identified with the
ego-personality. Because our identity feels frightened or threatened –
it becomes a matter of life and death – and we become deadly serious.
The vibrations of our normal daily consciousness slows down then,
becomes heavy and dense. We regress to an earlier stage of evolutionary
consciousness – the survival mode.
Principally it is really
not the content of a trauma in itself we react to, it is a reaction to
the change of expansion, meaning the former identification with the
ego-personality looses its control and want to avoid unpleasant
conditions.
The ego-personality represents a structure in which
consciousness can expand and evolve to a certain degree, and then the
evolution of consciousness needs another and different structure to
continue the expansion. As human beings it is not in our power to stop
the evolution of consciousness – so the process goes on no matter we
like it or not. The evolution of consciousness is not caring about our
personal opinions and feelings. So we can resist the pressure of
evolution, and then the energy goes into our creation of more and more
neurotic patterns.
We have to come to term with the fact that
we do not have a choice whether to stop evolution or not, our choice is
only how to cope with the process of expansion.